Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Datacenters that provide cloud services and clients of such datacenters may have one or more agreements (e.g., service-level agreements or SLAs) that specify minimum levels of service to be provided to the clients. When a client migrates a particular deployment from one datacenter (or multiple datacenters) to a new datacenter, the new datacenter may provide the same minimum level of service or performance that the client received at the original datacenter(s).
If the new datacenter is capable of providing performance exceeding the defined minimum level of performance, then it may be to the datacenter's benefit to provide performance up to the defined level, because the client is likely not valuing performance over the minimum. Moreover, the datacenter may then use the excess capability to service other, paying clients.
In the case of computational power, a processor with capabilities beyond what a customer defines may be reclaimed by the management of task virtualization. Once a computational level is determined to replicate client needs, the process may then be given less processor time, thereby reclaiming excess performance. A similar concept may apply to memory, where a virtual machine with relatively low memory demands may be co-located with other processes that may use excess memory.